Tagged Questions

Years ago I found in the internet a list of "Universal Words". i.g. words that exist in the same form (with minor variations) in all languages, and that don´t have synonyms (there are no other words ...

I was perusing the forums of a video game I play. I began reading a thread about the lore of the game, because a few things lore-wise are left pretty vague. Two individuals got into an argument about ...

For example, a common one is calling someone who helps out a hired-hand. Another example is gumshoe for a detective, or a private eye. Sometimes the association might be metaphorical, like whips in ...

In this video, Chomsky says that the rules of a language are pretty much artificial. How correct is he in regard to English? If what he says is correct, doesn't that undermine nearly every 'correct' ...

I was very much embarrassed when I was pointed out by ELU Senpai that I made a great mistake by misspelling ‘Mod election’ as ‘Mod erection’ during ELU chat.
We Japanese often make a silly mistake of ...

"We went swimming later in the afternoon, Jack and I."
I am trying to describe what is happening here by breaking the sentence down into it's basic components, but I am having difficulty doing this. ...

A dialect encompasses various traits of a group, including vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation (phonology). Is there a common term specifically for the phonological elements of a dialect? I’d like ...

Does the presumably nonstandard construction "(verb) for someone/something to (verb)" instead of "(verb) (someone/something) to (verb)" have any currency in modern day colloquial AE speech and "not so ...

This is a follow-up to a previous question which I am still trying to understand. I think I'm making progress in my understanding, but I would appreciate feedback to help me refine my thinking. Here ...

Sometimes, in humor (or an attempt thereof), people will make up gibberish in a certain language in an attempt to poke fun at a language or its speakers. Made-up French, German, Italian, Chinese, most ...

Can anyone tell me more about the relationship between the words none and any
I'm specifically interested in their grammatical overlap, when they share a similar grammatical function in a sentence, ...

I think it is a common puzzle for ESL,especially for Chinese,since English is more abstract than Chinese, using which we can feel some specific patterns flashing in our brain.
For example, when I see ...

The other day I read a question about nouns being used as verbs. An answer informed that in English any word can be used as a verb, but that it is not so in other languages. Beyond verbs, English is a ...